urban gardener: life is an experiment

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I was a bit mesmerized bee watching with my morning coffee. I could have watched them for hours. I spotted three different varieties busy pollinating among the flowers: large plump Bumble Bees, small fuzzy Mason Bees and these beautiful cool Metallic Green Bees. The Metallic Green Bee (Genus Agapostemon, also know as Sweat Bees) is a native bee found in North and South America. With a stunning green (or blue) metallic appearance, most males have the metallic green marking on the head and thorax with a yellow and black banded abdomen (as see in the photos) the females often have metallic green on their entire body. Today is the first time I spotted this beautiful creature in my garden. I hope they continue to come and visit!

Two days ago I was finally able to pick two peaches the squirrel did NOT eat. Early in the season he came to the garden and started biting into all the peaches before they were ripe…. letting the uneaten half fall to the ground to rot. I am not happy with that squirrel!

These two were low hanging and had a chance to grow to baseball size. After posting the image on social media a friend commented that she puts out peanuts to keep the squirrels from eating her bounty. I thought that was a good/easy piece of advise. Next year I might try netting the tree. I read that can help. If anyone out there has other advise or has had success in this area let me know.

Two years ago I created this blog with two posts. My gardening continued even though the blog posts did not. This July I started posting more photos and information about the garden via my instagram account using the hashtag #urbangardener. Since then I have been connecting with a lot of gardeners, farmers, cooks and other creatives both locally and from around the world. It’s been fun and I started thinking this is what I should be doing with that blog I created.

This weekend I went into the garden to take inventory. Every spring I enter the garden to see what has survived over the winter months. I entered with excitement looking into pots and the earth trying to identify just what were those little shoots starting to peek through. With this winter being especially long and cold I was a little worried but it seems like a lot of wonderful things are already growing and much of last year’s plants have made it through. The downstairs garden is already a bit of a jungle with ivy growing over some of the shrubs. There are also a few casualties that didn’t make it through that will need to be removed… and almost everything needs some pruning and clean up.

A few days ago I also started this blog even though I wasn’t really ready. I entered a temporary name for it because I had no idea what I wanted to call it and I put up a “test” home page. To my surprise I had a few “likes” right away on the image I loaded to the home page. I thought to myself “Wait, no don’t like my post yet… I’m not ready!” I need to set up the design, and the pages, and the categories and decide just what is it I’m going to write and it needs a better name. Oh well… I’m taking some first steps and hopefully something wonderful will grow on these pages.